Applying for financial aid can be stressful and scary. I spearheaded design in a cross-functional team to create a new experience that led to greater clarity for users and a decreased reliance on university support staff.
Show Me The Money
With schedules and curricula tailored for working adults, this top online university provides degrees and courses for more than 300 professions.
Hard skills
- Design thinking
- UX Writing
- UI / UX Design
- UX Research
- Information Architecture
- Prototyping
- Wireframing
soft Skills
- Empathy
- Leadership
- Communication
- Collaboration
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated any confidential information including the company name and branding.
The Problem
A vast majority of students at a leading online university utilize financial aid, but many struggled to understand the system using their existing dashboard [can I fit this in here:To fix a financial dashboard that was both overwhelming and under-serving its students,]. A simple lack of context and explanation was the biggest issue, leading students to call or email support for assistance. The university didn’t want confusion or discouragement to have any part in their students’ financial aid experience, nor did they want to tie up their support teams with conversations that could be prevented through better UX.
The original dashboard included content that didn't necessarily need to live there or could benefit from being presented in a different way. While financial transparency is always a plus, the right sidebar was paralyzing for many students and caused more confusion than [information.]
Many variations of ways to display their financial status were explored. After research and testing, we found that this information may be better displayed in a narrative form vs. a table. Knowing how much their next dispersement was or how much each class costs wasn't as important to them if the disbursements were on schedule, if there were any issues receiving payment or if anything needed their immediate attention.
The Solution
To tackle this problem, a team was formed comprised of a product manager, a researcher, two subject matter experts, and two developers, and myself as the primary, lead designer. My role was to bring design thinking to the table in every meeting, workshop, and review, and ultimately to deliver both low-fidelity wireframes for testing and high fidelity, developer-ready mockups. I saw to it that our decision-making processes were always oriented around what was best for the user.
As always, the first step was understanding the scope of the problem. Through conversations with the Director of Financial Services and the Finance Manager, along with a detailed audit of the current experience, I clarified for myself – and others on my team – a full list of pain points. We hypothesized that eliminating as many of these frictions as possible would lead to the self-service experience we wanted to deliver. To measure our success, we planned to test our new dashboard design with real students.
We tested a handful of different wireframes and ideas with a variety of students. What we learned underscored what we already knew – that financial aid is a sensitive, scary, and stressful aspect of any student’s life and that anything less than full clarity and accessibility was not going to cut it. The current dashboard was static and uninformative, especially to students in edge-case financial situations.
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With that in mind, my proposed solution was a dashboard that was more dynamic and contextual to each student. It does a better job of “holding the user’s hand”; in other words, surfacing the most critical information and giving them direct actions to take. And it’s supplemented with resources like help text, knowledge base articles, and small details like tooltips designed to proactively answer the students’ most common questions.
The Results
Users with whom we tested the new ideas reported that they had a much better understanding of the financial aid process and what was expected of them. While it’s still in development, the team and I are confident that we’ll hit our OKR with a measurable reduction in calls to support staff.